This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at

tamistic institute.org. To some degree, my talk title is misleading. Because by saying, I am not my

passions, you might think that I'm going to be discussing the relationship between our personal identity and our passions.

That's not exactly what I'm going to be doing, although there is some way in which the talk is going to touch upon that.

Instead, what I'm going to be addressing is the relationship between our passions and our happiness. And it's because of the

connection with happiness that we that it often touches upon the idea of identity. For today,

we often wrap up ideas of happiness with our notions of self. But now to begin, I want to begin with the point that sister made last night, which is that

she reminded us that for St. Thomas and for Aristotle, there is no such thing as a passion

devoid of intelligence in human beings.

Whereas non-human animals can have passions and emotions that are not subject to reason

because they don't have reason.

So humans have passions, but all of them are wrapped up to some degree with our intellect,

with our reason.

The kind of overlap there or the control that reason might have over the passions or the control that the passions might have over reason depends on the greater or lesser

extent to which we have grown in virtue.

Now, both of my talks this morning are going to be focused on the relationship between our

passions and our reason and how that's related to happiness.

And the views that I'm going to be looking at today have their origins in antiquity, but also have successors that influence us today, though they are, of course, developed and

slightly different.

So I'd like to address both ancient and modern versions of these, with an emphasis more

in the modern ideas.

So we will look at two errors in these two talks.

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